Viewership Deep Dive: ‘Jersey Shore: Family Vacation’ Is Back

The Jersey Shore gang is back for another fun-filled vacation, with MTV kicking off season two of the spin-off with a two-hour premiere last week. We worked with Inscape, the TV measurement company with glass-level data from a panel of more than 9 million smart TVs and devices, to examine viewership trends around the series. Also below: emotional insights courtesy of Canvs.

We first looked at crossover between the original Jersey Shore (note: as it’s been off the air as a continuing series since 2012, the data below is based on reruns over the last year) and Family Vacation. Inscape found that while 66% of households that watched rebroadcasts of the original also watched Family Vacation, only 49% of Family Vacation fans also tuned into Jersey Shore.

This audience, as you may expect, loves their reality TV shows. Of the most popular shows also watched, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen and Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta topped the list.

As we’ve seen with other location-based reality TV shows, there are hot spots of viewership. For both Jersey Shore and Jersey Shore: Family Vacation, New Jersey and the New England areas are key; there’s also high tune-in around the Los Angeles/San Diego/Yuma and Las Vegas DMAs. (On the heatmaps below, the darker the color in the graphic, the more households were tuning in.)

Staying with reality-TV trends, the more episodes a Family Vacation-viewing household watches, the less likely they are to timeshift.

According to emotion measurement AI company Canvs, across both seasons of Jersey Shore: Family Vacation so far (season one aired earlier this spring), there have been 157,248 Emotional Reactions (ERs) on Twitter. For the first season, Snooki was the character driving the most emotional conversation, appearing in 4.3% of all ERs.